by David Wong
Pause. Nothing from the doctor. He was in his fifties, but looked like he could still take me in a game of basketball, even though I was half his age. His gray hair was cut like a 1990’s era George Clooney. Type of guy whose life had gone exactly as he’d expected it. I bet he’d never shot a delivery guy with a crossbow even once.
I said, “Okay, I wasn’t drunk. I’d only had one beer. I thought the guy was threatening me and my girlfriend Amy. It was a misunderstanding.”
“He said you accused him of being a monster.”
“It was dark.”
“The neighbors heard you shout to him, and I’m quoting from the police report, ‘Go back to Hell you unholy abomination, and tell Korrok I have a lot more arrows where that came from.’”
“Well … that’s out of context.”
“So you do believe in monsters.”
“No. Of course not. It was … a metaphor or something.”
He had a nameplate on his desk: Dr. Bob Tennet. Next to it was a bobblehead of a St. Louis Cardinals baseball player. I glanced around the room, saw he had a leftover Halloween decoration still taped to his window, a cardboard jack-o’-lantern with a cartoon spider crawling out of its mouth. The doctor had only five books on the shelf behind him, which I thought was hilarious because I owned more books than that and I wasn’t even a doctor. Then I realized they were all written by him. They had long titles like The Madness of Crowds: Decoding the Dynamics of Group Paranoia and A Person Is Smart, People Are Stupid: An Analysis of Mass Hysteria and Groupthink. Should I be flattered or insulted that I apparently got referred to a world-class expert in the subject of why people believe in stupid shit?
He said, “You understand, the court didn’t order these sessions because you believe in monsters.”
“Right, they want to make sure I won’t shoot anyone else with a crossbow.”
He laughed. That surprised me. I didn’t think these guys were allowed to laugh. “They want to make sure you’re not a danger to yourself or others. And while I know it’s counterintuitive, that process will actually be easier if you don’t think of it as a test you have to pass.”
“But if I’d shot somebody over a girl or a stolen case of beer, I wouldn’t be here. I’m here because of the monster thing. Because of who I am.”
“Do you want to talk about your beliefs?”
I shrugged. “You know the stories that go around this town. People disappear here. Cops disappear. But I can tell the difference between reality and fantasy. I work, I have a girlfriend, I’m a productive citizen. Well, not productive, I mean if you add up what I bring to society and what I take out, society probably breaks even. And I’m not crazy. I mean, I know anybody can say that. But a crazy person can’t fake sane, right? The whole point of being crazy is that you can’t separate crazy ideas from normal ones. So, no, I don’t believe the world is full of monsters disguised as people, or ghosts, or men made of shadows. I don’t believe that the town of—
* * *
*The name of the town where this story takes place will remain undisclosed so as not to add to the local tourism traffic.*
* * *
—is a howling orgy of nightmares. I fully recognize that all of those are things only a mentally ill person believes. Therefore, I do not believe them.”
Boom. Therapy accomplished.
No answer from Dr. Tennet. Fuck him. I’ll sit like this forever. I’m great at not talking to people.
After a minute or so I said, “Just … to be clear, what’s said in this room doesn’t leave this room, right?”
“Unless I believe a crime is about to be committed, that’s correct.”
“Can I show you something? On my phone? It’s a video clip. I recorded it myself.”
“If it’s important to you.”
I pulled out the phone and dug through the menus until I found a thirty-second clip I’d recorded about a month ago. I held it up for him to see.
It was a nighttime scene, at an all-night burrito stand near my house. Out front was a faded picnic table, a rusted fifty-five-gallon drum for a trash can and a whiteboard with prices scrawled in dry erase marker. Without a doubt the best burritos you can possibly get within six blocks of my house at four in the morning.
The grainy shot (my phone’s camera wasn’t worth a damn in low light) caught the glare of headlights as a black SUV pulled up. Stepping out of it was a young Asian man in a shirt and tie. He casually walked around the tiny orange building, nodding to the kid at the counter. He went to a narrow door in the rear, opened it and stepped inside.
After about ten seconds, the shot shakily moved toward the door. A hand extended into frame—my hand—and pulled the door open. Inside were some cardboard boxes with labels like LARGE LIDS and MED. PAPER BAGS—WHITE along with a broom and a mop and bucket.
The Asian man was gone. There was no visible exit.
The clip ended.
I said, “You saw it, right? Guy goes in, guy doesn’t come out. Guy’s not in there. He’s not in the burrito stand. He’s just gone.”
“You believe this is evidence of the supernatural.”
“I’ve seen this guy since then. Around town. This isn’t some burrito shop Bermuda Triangle, sucking in innocent passersby. The guy walked right toward it, on purpose. And he came out somewhere else. And I knew he was coming, because he did the same thing, every night, at the same time.”
“You believe there was a secret passage or something of the sort?”
“Not a physical one. There’s no hatch in the floor or anything. We checked. No, it’s like a … wormhole or something. I don’t know. But that’s not even the point. It’s not just that there was a, uh, magical burrito door there, or whatever it was, it’s that the guy knew what it was and how to use it. There are people like that around town.”
“And you believe these people are dangerous.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ, I am not going to shoot him with a crossbow. How can you not be impressed by this?”
“It’s important to you that I believe you.”
I just realized he was phrasing all of his questions as statements. Wasn’t there a character in Alice in Wonderland who did that? Did Alice punch him in the face?
“Okay. I could have faked the video. You have the option of believing that. And man, if I could have that option, like if I could buy it from you, I’d pay anything. If you told me you’d reach into my brain and turn off my belief in all of this stuff, and in exchange I just had to let you, say, shoot me in the balls with one of those riot control beanbag guns, I’d sign the deal right now. But I can’t.”
“That must be very frustrating for you.”
I snorted. I looked down at the floor between my knees. There was a faded brown stain on the carpet and I wondered if a patient had once taken a shit in here in the middle of a session. I ran my hands through my hair and felt my fingers tighten and twist it, pain radiating down my scalp.
Stop it.
He said, “I can see this is upsetting you. We can change the subject if you like.”
I made myself sit up and take a deep breath.
“No. This is what we’re here to talk about, right?”
He shrugged. “I think it’s important to you.”
Yes, in the way that the salt is important to the slug.
He said, “It’s up to you.”
I sighed, considered for a few beats, then said, “One time, early in the morning, I was getting ready for work. I go into the bathroom and…”
* * *
… turned on the shower, but the water just stopped in midair.
I don’t mean the water hovered there, frozen in time. That would be crazy. No, the spray was pouring down about twelve inches from the nozzle, then spreading and splattering as if the stream was breaking against something solid. Like an invisible hand was held under the showerhead to test the temperature.
I stood there outside the shower stall, naked, squinting in dull confusion. Now, I’m not the smartes
t guy under normal circumstances but my 6 A.M. brain has an IQ of about 65. I vaguely thought it was some kind of plumbing problem. I stared stupidly at the interrupted umbrella-shaped spray of water, resisting the impulse to reach out and touch the space the water couldn’t seem to pass through. Fear was slowly bubbling up into my brain. Hairs stood up on my back. I glanced down, blinking, as if I would find a note explaining all of this taped to my pubic hair. I didn’t.
Then, I heard the spray change, the splattering on the tiles taking on a different tone. I glanced up and saw the part of the flow farthest from me slowly return to normal, the water shooting past the invisible obstruction in a gentle arc. The unseen thing was passing out of the stream. It wasn’t until the spray looked completely normal again that I realized this meant the invisible thing that had been blocking the water was now moving toward me.
I jumped back, moving so quick that I thought the half-open shower curtain had blown back from the wind of my rapid movement. But that wasn’t right, because the curtain didn’t return to its normal shape right away. It stayed bulged outward, something unseen pushing against it. I backed up against the wall, feeling the towel bar pressing into my back. The shower curtain fell straight again and now there was nothing in the bathroom but the radio static sound of the shower splattering against tile. I stood there, frozen, heart pounding so hard I was getting dizzy. I slowly put a hand out, tentative, toward the curtain, through the space the unseen thing had passed …
Nothing.
I decided to forget about the shower. I cranked off the water, turned toward the door and—
I saw something. Or I almost did. Just out of the corner of my eye, a dark shape, a black figure whipping through the doorway just out of sight. Like a shadow without the person.
I couldn’t have seen it for more than a tenth of a second, but I did see it, now imprinted in my brain from that flash of a glance. The form, black, in the shape of a man but then becoming formless, like a single drop of dark food coloring before it dissolves in a sink of running water.
I had seen it before.
* * *
“… I thought I saw something in there. I don’t know. Probably nothing.”
I slumped in the chair and crossed my arms.
“This is a source of anxiety for you. Having these beliefs, and feeling like you can’t talk about them without being dismissed.”
I stared out of the window, at my Bronco rusting in the parking lot, the metal eager to get back to just being dirt. Life was probably easier for it back then.
I said, “Who’s paying for these sessions again?”
“Payment is your responsibility. But we have a sliding scale.”
“Awesome.”
He considered for a moment and then said, “Would it put you more at ease if I told you that I believe in monsters?”
“It might put me at ease, but I can’t speak for the people who hand out psychiatrist licenses.”
“I’ll tell you a story. Now, I understand that with your … hobbies, people contact you, correct? Believing they have ghosts or demons in their homes?”
“Sometimes.”
“And I am going to make an assumption—if you arrive and tell them that the source of their anxiety is not in fact supernatural, they are anything but relieved. Correct? Meaning they want the banging in their attic to be a ghost, and not a squirrel trapped in the chimney.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“So you see, fear is just another manifestation of insecurity. What humans want most of all, is to be right. Even if we’re being right about our own doom. If we believe there are monsters around the next corner ready to tear us apart, we would literally prefer to be right about the monsters, than to be shown to be wrong in the eyes of others and made to look foolish.”
I didn’t answer. I glanced around for a clock. He didn’t have one, the bastard.
“So, a few years ago, while I was presenting at a conference in Europe, my wife called and insisted that the walls of our laundry room were throbbing. That was the word she used. Pulsing, like the wall itself was alive. She described a hum, an energy, that she could feel as soon as she walked into the room. I suggested it was a wiring problem. She became … let’s just say, agitated at that point. Three days later, just before I was due to come back, she called again. The problem was getting worse, she said. There was an audible hum now, from the wall. She couldn’t sleep. She could hear it as soon as she walked in the house. She could feel it, the vibration, like something unnatural was ready to burst forth into our world. So, I flew home the next day, and found her extremely upset. I understood immediately why my suggestion of a wiring problem was so insulting—this was the sound of something alive. Something massive. So, even though I was exhausted, jet-lagged and just completely dead on my feet, I had no other thought than to go out to the garage, get my tools and peel off the siding. Guess what I found.”
I didn’t answer.
“Guess!”
“I’m not sure I want to know.”
“Bees. They had built an entire hive in the wall, sprawling from floor to ceiling. Tens of thousands of them.”
His face was lighting up with the telling of his amusing anecdote. Why not? He was getting paid to tell it.
“So I went and put on a hat and gloves and wrapped my wife’s scarf around my face and sprayed the hive, I killed them by the thousands. Only later did I realize that the bees are quite valuable and a local beekeeper actually came and carefully removed the hive itself at no charge. I think he’d have actually paid me if I hadn’t killed so many of them at the start.”
“Hmm.”
“Do you understand?”
“Yeah, your wife thought it was a monster. Turned out to just be bees. So my little problem, probably just bees. It’s all bees. Nothing to worry about.”
“I’m afraid you misunderstood. That was the day that a very powerful, very dangerous monster turned out to be real. Just ask the bees.”
36 Hours Prior to Outbreak
I said, “Can you see me?”
The freckled redhead on my laptop screen said, “Yep.” Amy Sullivan had her hair in pigtails, which I like, and was wearing a huge, ironic T-shirt with a badly drawn eagle and American flag on it, which I hate. It was like a tent on her.
She asked, “How did your therapy go?”
“Jesus, Amy. You don’t start a conversation with your boyfriend asking him how his court-ordered therapy went. You have to ease into that.”
“Ah, sorry.”
“It’s a sensitive subject.”
“Okay, forget it.”
I said, “Are you coming home for Thanksgiving?”
“Yep. You miss me, don’t you?”
“You know I can’t function on my own.”
After a beat and another sip of tea she said, “Are you going to be all right? Not just with the therapy but that whole … situation?”
“Your, uh, roommate isn’t around, right?”
“No.”
“Okay. Yeah, it’s fine. Everything is quiet.”
She said, “That scared me, that night.”
“I know it did.”
“Nothing had happened like that for a long time—”
“I know.”
“If something like that happens again—”
“I’ll shoot it with a crossbow again. I told you that.”
“Did you talk to your therapist about that?”
“Subtle, Amy.”
“Well, I’m curious.”
“How did I find a girl who’s worse at conversation than I am?”
She took a sip from a teacup she pulled from off camera. She had to balance the cup with her left wrist. That is, the stump where her left hand should be. She was in a car accident when she was a teenager, before I knew her. The crash took her hand and her parents, and left her with chronic back pain and an implanted titanium rod in her spine. She refused to get a prosthetic hand because she thought they were “creepy.” But in my mind, b
etween the titanium spine and a robot hand, she’d be like 10 percent of the way to a cyborg, an idea that I found more than mildly arousing.
Amy and I had “met” in high school, in a special ed classroom for kids with “behavior” disorders. Neither of us really belonged there, she was there because she had a bad reaction to pain medication and bit a teacher, I was there due to a misunderstanding (a bully kept fucking with me until I snapped and gouged out his eyes—you know how kids are). Our fairy-tale romance began by us completely ignoring each other for five years, during which I only knew her by a crude nickname some asshole had given her. Then one day, John and I were asked as a favor to look into her disappearance. It wasn’t a big deal, and only took us a couple of days to get to the bottom of it (she had been kidnapped by monsters).
Setting aside her tea she said, “So what’s he like? The psychiatrist?”
“It’s just like you’ve seen in the movies, Amy. They get you talking and wait for you to announce you’ve had an epiphany.” I thought for a moment, then said, “And the therapist was a she, not a he. She’s about twenty-two. Busty. She kept turning everything into some kind of sexual innuendo. Like she said she believed therapy should be ‘hands on’ and grabbed my crotch. Then we porked on the desk for a while and the time was up.” I shrugged. “Like I said, it’s just like in that movie. Anal Therapist VI.”
She sighed and sipped her tea. “So I guess you don’t miss me after all.”
“Wait … were we not supposed to be having sex with other people, Amy? I guess that was never made clear to me, sorry.”
She didn’t answer, or laugh, and I said, “Come on, you know if one of us wanted to sleep around you’d have a way easier time than I would. I’m the crazy guy who sees monsters and shoots delivery people. You’re the adorable redhead. You could go down to the guys’ floor of the dorm and say, ‘I’m a woman. I want to have sex’ and you’d have twenty guys lined up with roses and shit. I’d have to work at it.”
“Why do guys always say that? It’s just as hard for a girl.”
“That’s ridiculous. Every bar is full of guys desperate to get laid and girls desperate to fend off all the horny guys. It’s just the way it is, it’s biology. It’s easier for girls.”